Posted in Art, Film, Literature, tagged running, Tate Britain, Work No 850, Haruki Murakami, Rachel Whiteread, Martin Creed, Turner Prize, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on November 7, 2008 | No Comments »
Martin Creed owes me kicks. My twelve-year-old Green Flash have finally expired, and the cheeky conceptual bulb-botherer’s to blame. (Martin, if you’re reading, as I have no doubt you are, these superfeet are just the right side of revolting. C’mon. Make a poor Blonde smile.)
Let me explain. Having failed to give much of a shit [...]
Posted in Film, Music, tagged Spain, the sound of silence, the graduate, dustin hoffman on September 22, 2008 | No Comments »
Blame Spain. The Blonde’s shocking recent silence can be attributed to an Iberian version of the below, with equal amounts of solar-powered paralysis and hormonally turgid turpitude, but maybe a little more chest hair.
Never fear. She’s back. And off for a wax.
Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged palaces, stately homes, Versaillles on August 19, 2008 | No Comments »
I have a love/hate affair with what Virginia Woolf called ‘those comfortable padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.’ Surely even those without a mother prone to riff on the earnest, sweaty idealism of her days in the SWP must feel the chill fingers of the little match girl [...]
Posted in Architecture, Film, Literature, Theatre, tagged Burbage's theatre, London, memory, Muppets, New York, Paris, Shakespeare on August 6, 2008 | No Comments »
So, the original site of Will’s first Theatre has been found. Londinia, the old tart, sweeps up her crusty skirts to show what she’s been hiding all along and laughs at our redfaced surprise.
We shouldn’t be shocked. Paris may be the curlicued, calorie-controlled charmeuse with the pristine avenues and neatly trimmed bush; New York may [...]
Posted in Architecture, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged Antony Gormley, Dickens, Don DeLilo, Heath Ledger, the city, The Dark Knight, Underworld on August 1, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In the moist, muggy days of England’s sort-of summer, when I should be out playing croquet with hedgehogs, bathing my milky, sun-shy skin in cucumber-plump Pimms, and wearing a little something like this, I’ve been mentally rooted in the subscape and the skyscrape of the beast we call City: that bustling, shadowed playpen filled with [...]
Posted in Film, Literature, tagged realism, david lean, great expectations, lawrence of arabia, BFI, NFT on June 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The best literary and filmic realism stems from meticulously constructed fakery. The English, masters of precise practical craftsmanship and emotional detachment, do it particularly well: we frigid orgasm-feigning voyeurs are brilliant at building sincere pieces of insincerity that hit the heart by tricking the mind. From Thackeray and Hardy to Eliot and Dickens, our great [...]
Posted in Art, Film, Music, tagged Indiana Jones, film score, film soundtrack, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, shape of song on June 3, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Brief Encounter has a lot to answer for; the appropriation of much-loved music for a film score can feel intrusive and often belittling. There is an irrevolcable loss of innocence when a tender, treasured tune that has companionably quivered and nibbled at your earlobes for years is suddenly gang-raped into a hard little whorish soundbite [...]
Posted in Fashion, Film, Literature, TV, Theatre, tagged Casablanca, iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Catch Up, Little Nell, David Tennant, John Galliano, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bungalow 8, Experimental Cocktail Club of Paris, Mad Men on April 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The line is Play it once, Sam, not Play it again, and now I know why. If the iPlayer had been around in 1940s filmworld Casablanca, Rick would be watching reruns of Sam on Later with Jools in his riad whilst Ilsa shunned gin joints to binge on out-of-season Desperate Housewives.
Introducing the ‘watch again’ concept [...]
Posted in Art, Fashion, Film, Theatre, tagged Annie Leibovitz, glamour, hitchcock, Molly Ringwald, Paul Scofield, Vanity Fair on March 25, 2008 | 4 Comments »
If glamour is the ability to cast a sexual spell, Annie Leibovitz’s photographs have all the magic of a mute glove-puppet panda with a middle-aged man’s hand stuffed up it’s arse. Her famous photographic tableaux of the blue-blooded and the beautiful, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery and featured in a commemorative online Vanity [...]
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